Facebook Ad Campaign Promotes Personalized Advertising

By Nat Ives

Facebook Inc. will promote the value of targeted ads to businesses and consumers in a new ad campaign in digital media, radio and TV programming including National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball games and Sunday's Golden Globe Awards.

"For every big idea that rose to wild acclaim, there are so many more that never found their fame," one commercial in the campaign says.

"Good ideas deserve to be found," the ad concludes in on-screen text. "Personalized Ads help you find them."

The effort comes as Apple Inc. nears implementation of a policy requiring many apps to ask users whether they want their behavior on the web to be tracked for the purposes of personalized ads.

Facebook relies on the data from that sort of tracking to inform the targeted advertising it sells, and said in January that it expects the policy to weigh on the performance of its ad business.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the campaign wasn't spurred by Apple's planned moves, calling it the latest stage in a long push to inform businesses about Facebook's tools. The ads don't mention Apple.

"With this campaign, we want to highlight the value of personalized ads and how they are an important way people discover small businesses on Facebook and Instagram, and are what help small businesses grow from an idea into a livelihood," she said.

But Apple's changes will make it harder for small businesses to reach their customers with personalized ads, the spokeswoman said. "We simply do not agree with this approach," she said.

Apple has defended its new policy as giving priority to users' privacy. The company doesn't plan to prohibit tracking, it has said, only require app makers to get users' permission for it.

Facebook plans to accompany Apple's new prompts with a screen describing how certain data is used to personalize a user's experience and asking permission to use data collected from third-party websites and apps.

Write to Nat Ives at nat.ives@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 25, 2021 09:14 ET (14:14 GMT)

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